Katrina Shakes Faith in U.S. Around the World

By Pueng Vongs, Pacific News Service, 14 September 2005

Editor's Note: News media worldwide are shocked by images of
the superpower United States reeling from Hurricane Katrina.

SAN FRANCISCO—Readers and commentators from abroad are watching
images of chaos and despair in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and
are wondering how a country so mighty could have fallen so far.

“Nature Lays a Superpower Low” reads the headline of an
editorial in The Hindu, a daily in Chennai. Arvind Sivaramakrishnan,
commenting in another article in the paper, writes that Katrina
exposed “squalor that would shame a Third World country, as well
as racial and political divisions reminiscent of apartheid South
Africa.”

“It is astonishing that these cruel indignities are happening
today in one of the richest countries in human history,” writes
Dr. Firoz Osman in South Africa's Business Day.

Mario Diamant, a commentator in La Nacion, a Buenos Aires-based daily,
posits: “Can such a powerful nation be so vulnerable? Can a
capricious act of nature erase 200 years of progress and
technology?”

An editorial in the Philippine Daily Inquirer takes a similar
tack. The forces of the hurricane brought out the “lack of
preparedness of a superpower that could invade and overrun another
country thousands of miles away in a matter of days.”

In Kathmandu, Nepal, the daily Himalayan Times writes in an editorial,
“America the ‘High and Mighty’ had become America,
the ‘Humbled and Muddy.’”

A cartoon in the London-based Arabic-language Al Quds Al Arabi
newspaper sums up the disbelief. It shows President Bush with the
upper body of Superman—and two skinny legs exposed by the
hurricane.

Many foreign media focus on the Bush administration's failure to
respond adequately in the aftermath of the storm. An editorial in the
Taiwan-based, Chinese-language World Journal by Chen Sheyao blames the
Bush administration for treating its own citizens like
terrorists. “Images of tanks roaming the streets of New Orleans,
soldiers attempting to inact martial law: This is more like Iraq than
America.”

The war in Iraq, Chen writes, “has taken a surprising emotional
toll on Americans: everyone is now a possible terrorist. Soldiers who
were trained to point their guns at Iraqi civilians are now pointing
their guns at innocent evacuees in New Orleans.”

South Korea's Pusan Daily also makes reference to the ongoing
dilemma in Iraq and Afghanistan, finding it ironic that while the
United States has spent billions of dollars and exhausted its military
resources in dealing with the affairs of other countries, America
cannot prevent the levees in New Orleans from being breeched.

La Nacion's Mario Diamant finds it suspect that Halliburton, the
transnational corporation that vice-president Dick Cheney once headed
and whose performance in Iraq is intensely criticized, “received
a $12 million contract to rebuild ports. And Bechtel, the group that
lists in its rosters the current president's father, received a
million dollar contract to build temporary housing.”

Other foreign media are more forgiving of the evacuation
mishaps. Rajeev Srinivasan in Rediff.com, an online news site based in
Mumbai, doubts that India has the capability for evacuating and caring
for half a million people should a similar hurricane hit the
country. He also wonders what India would do if ocean levels rose and
millions of Bangladeshis “invaded” India.

Observers from around the world were united in their outpouring of
empathy for victims of the hurricane. Many countries, rich and poor,
sent aid. Kuwait gave a half a billion dollars. Uganda sent
$200,000. Bangladesh sent tea, Namibia sent canned fish and Thailand
sent rice. Others expressed their admiration for American citizens who
helped each other. “The response from American leaders seemed to
lack political intelligence and sympathy, but the response of ordinary
citizens was quick and compassionate,” writes Liu Tian in the
World Journal.

But some say the disaster taught bitter lessons. Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga
writes in the Monitor, a daily newspaper in Kampala, Uganda, that
Africans and those of African descent around the world should not put
much faith in the United States.

“Whether you are in peril in Darfur, Sudan, Ruhengeri, Rwanda or
New Orleans, saving your black behind isn’t a priority for the
American government, founded on a doctrine of white supremacy,”
he writes. He concludes that the Gulf coast disaster could well
deplete funds committed to the global fight against poverty and
disease.

London-based writer Joseph Hanlon, writing for the Agencia de
Informacao de Mocambique (Mozambique) in Maputo, says that in
responding to flood crises, the United States has much to learn from
Mozambique, one of the poorest countries in the world. Hanlon says
550,000 people were displaced by flooding in 2000 in southern
Mozambique. Only 700 people died. The country had undertaken extensive
preparation by training personnel and stockpiling goods including
food, medicines, tents and plastic sheeting.

When the disaster hit, local leaders evacuated people to tent cities
on high ground, in intact neighborhoods. Forty thousand others were
saved with small boats.

The country also used NGOs such as Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders,
the South African air force and UNICEF. Helicopters were flying in one
day and rescued some 14,000 people. The United States, Hanlon writes,
should have done the same.

Pueng Vongs is an editor of New California Media, an association of
over 700 print, broadcast and online ethnic media organizations
founded in 1996 by Pacific News Service and members of ethnic
media. Donal Brown, Aruna Lee, Sandip Roy, Eugenia Chien, Elena Shore,
Jalal Ghazi and Rene Ciria-Cruz contributed to this report.